brookes at uab.edu ("Paul S. Brookes.") writes:
> Nice ideas, following a breif skip through, but at several thousand words
> surely you can't expect the underpaid busy academics who populate this group
> to devote the best part of an hour to reading and digesting this?
An hour? You must read slowly.
The ideas for an experiment on X are interesting, but it should be
remembered that (a) X sperm are heavier so, an apples-with-apples
comparison might not be as easy as expected (b) a haploid nucleus is
significantly different to a diploid nucleus. Diploid silencing and
imprinting mechanisms are complex and have no equivalent in haploid
cells -- although whether this is likely to affect something as
primitive as mt repair mechanims remains to be seen (c) given the
selection pressures, spermatazoon have probably evolved an aggressive
trade off of structural damage for speed, since they don't live long
anyway.
The body contains more information which may be corrupted than just
that represented in mtDNA and nucDNA! RNA, proteins and their
positioning in space are different to somatic DNA only in the degree
of influence they have on future structure. While it's clear that some
somatic DNA changes have the potential for dramatic cascading effects
(e.g TP53), so do prions (e.g CJD). These are both extremes. Normal
aging can be considered a more prosaic cascade of ever failing
inter-dependent information structures, including the structures designed
to repair them.
--
Julian Assange |If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people
|together to collect wood or assign them tasks and
proff at iq.org |work, but rather teach them to long for the endless
proff at gnu.ai.mit.edu |immensity of the sea. -- Antoine de Saint Exupery